Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: book review

It begins when we are children, the desire to colour in the bold outlines of the Tudors. We know so much – the clothes, jewels, buildings, battles, the sudden savagery of royal justice – and yet so little about the thoughts and feelings of even the literate players. Every generation throws up its own colourists, hacks who provide the lurid scenes their trade demands. Their books sell, but never last.

Every now and then an artist of another mettle is drawn into the Tudor fray, and turns everything we knew on its head. Characters are no longer fixed, conviction becomes evasion, courage a moveable feast. In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantelrewrites the history of England from 1527 to 1535 with Thomas Cromwell as the hero.

We meet him first as the victim of his violent father, a Putney blacksmith. He runs away from home and Mantel leaves him to grow up alone. We see him next in the service of Cardinal Wolsey and we only learn of those years in between from what Cromwell reveals, which isn’t much: some years as a mercenary in France, some more with the bankers in Florence, some time as a clothier, some more as a lawyer. The cardinal, a study in mocking courtesy and worldly detachment, is delighted by his protégé’s obscure origins: they give him the opportunity to paint his character. We meet this character intermittently through the pages of Wolf Hall, long after Wolsey himself has faded from the picture. The king, for example, believes Cromwell was brought up in a monastery, which gives him a special aptitude for the cardinal’s work of closing down religious houses to build schools and colleges.

Cromwell is a reformer, but not a zealot. He finds old practices unsavoury – hairshirts, paying for relief from purgatory – but he is also exasperated by the obstinacy of those such as Tyndale, on whose behalf he tries to broker a deal. His radicalism has more to do with caste than God. He plays the great game with no respect for rank. When the Duke of Norfolk, Anne Boleyn’s uncle, rants about the cheek of Wolsey – “Cardinal’s hat not big enough for him, only a crown will do for Thomas bloody Wolsey the bleeding butcher’s boy, and I tell you, I tell you” – Cromwell privately thinks: “My lord would have made such an excellent king; so benign, so sure and suave in his dealings, so equitable, so swift and so discerning. His rule would have been the best rule, his servants the best servants; and how he would have enjoyed his state.”

Mantel’s insight is that Norfolk and co had reason enough to hate and fear Cromwell without Cromwell needing to be either hateful or fearful. It was enough that he was a low-born outsider unencumbered by conviction (“believe nobody” he advises his ward) with one line to the king and another to the moneylenders. He is flattered by Thomas More’s account of his character – “lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money” – and chooses his pupils in the counting room with the refinement that the king reserves for his ambassadors: “The page of an accounts book is there?… to open your heart to possibility. It’s like the scriptures: it’s there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.”

In the end, however wedded you are to subtle revisions and shades of grey, you cannot back Cromwell without spitting on More. Mantel’s More is physically grubby and mentally vain, gleefully seeking out, torturing and burning suspected heretics, maudlin and self-regarding in his familial relations. It is a shocking revision of this reader’s pieties, brilliantly done. At Chelsea we see the saint presiding over a household where his pompous lawyer father is loved and indulged while the women (except Meg, the Greek-scholar daughter) are routinely taunted. When Cromwell dines there, the conversation is in Latin, which More’s wife, Dame Alice, does not know:

“Eat, eat,” says More. “All except Alice, who will burst out of her corset.”

At her name she turns her head. “That expression of painful surprise is not native to her,” More says. “It is produced by scraping back her hair and driving in great ivory pins, to the peril of her skull. She believes her forehead is too low. It is, of course. Alice, Alice,” he says, “remind me why I married you.”

This in contrast toCromwell’s establishment at Austin Friars, which teems with in-laws and wards and nephews and abandoned wives who are light and joshing in their heresies and fallouts. Neither children nor servants are whipped. Cromwell’s wife, a sensible homely woman, dies early on and his daughters not long after. These losses humanise him and when Cranmer shuffles onto the scene it makes sense that Cromwell should be the confidant of his marriage secrets. Henry hated married clergy, but Cranmer couldn’t help himself and Cromwell warms to the man’s weakness.

In lesser hands Cromwell’s modern sympathies – believing in nurture over nature, loving over burning, learning over prayer – might make for a lifeless and anachronistic portrait. But the devil is in the language and Mantel animates the familiar story with great imagination. Cromwell, summoned to see the king in his bedchamber after a bad dream, finds him covered in a gown of sable-lined velvet. “The sable lining creeps down over his hands, as if he were a monster-king, growing his own fur.” Later we see the rubies clustered on the king’s knuckles “like bubbles of blood” and Norfolk in his agitation jumping up and down “like Satan in a Corpus Christi play”.

Mantel knows how to build a picture from the parts available, with nothing extraneous and everything layered. Here is Katherine – “as wide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling with gemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword?… Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun.” Cromwell remembers Wolsey’s lesson: always try to find out what people wear under their clothes. “At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin.”